


Aesthetics

by cadavatar



Category: Long Exposure (Webcomic)
Genre: Blink And You Miss It Slash, Brief Smut, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Inspired by Reality, M/M, Mitch understands the internet, My First Work in This Fandom, Oneshot, Since he's not an idiot, aesthetic, read the notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 21:21:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11722803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadavatar/pseuds/cadavatar
Summary: There is nothing in the wide world of tumblr or pinterest that can explain the sort of aesthetic their relationship is. And even if there was, Jonas would never tell Mitch anyway, because he doubts that he knows what the word “aesthetic” means.





	Aesthetics

People romanticize trailers and poverty all the time online. Gritty filters, perfect angles that crop out reality. “Rust Belt America” looks good on a screen, not so good when Jonas is walking to Mitch’s house and he can tell how close he is when the potholes in the street are more frequent and gradually fill with trash. The kids get leaner. Their older siblings get meaner. Less of them stop to stare when he passes, afraid of giving up their childhood secrets, and there’s a gradual slip into roughhousing antics and then outright warfare waged with wiry arms clothed in ragged, hand me down sleeves. Where Jonas comes from, kids park their bikes in the backyard with the kickstands up. Here, bikes are discarded on the sidewalk, handlebars askew, rusted corpses where they fell. 

This is a place not built for people like him, but he loves it anyway, because it’s real. Everything about it is so _real_. 

When Jonas comes home after school, everything smells like disinfectant and febreze. He understands—no really, he does—that Sue has to keep the place clean for all the foster kids since some of them don’t have good immune systems. But it doesn’t smell like a house that’s made to live in. It smells like a day care center or a classroom, a place to visit, but never to stay. But there’s perfect kind of aesthetic to describe their house: he knows because Sue uses and abuses pinterest like a woman possessed. DIY projects in their kitchen, Hobby Lobby “God Bless Our Home” décor on the walls, little knickknacks and curios that rotate out based on the seasons, going into storage for the next year—it’s modern Christian homemaker lite. (He calls it “lite” as a halfhearted jibe; Dean has a great job and they have foster care money but they’re still scraping by at a comfortable middle class rate. The coupons on the kitchen table are part of that aesthetic.) 

But Lorraine’s trailer... Okay, so it actually smells _terrible_. It reeks, the intensity varying each visit. It’s a vague mixture of carpeting mildew and whatever dishes are festering in the kitchen sink, but mostly of the stale tobacco smoke that makes the walls weep brown when it’s humid. All these smells overpower the weed. Skunky as it is, it’s so infrequent that it has no hope of taking over. Sometimes when he’s lucky, Jonas will come over on a day when the windows are all forced open against the groans and whines of aging wood and plastic, letting in the smell of a freshly cut lawn. Those are the days the house also smells faintly of sweat underneath the acid, nose burning harshness of chemicals. Those days are when Mitch can’t stomach the mounting mess anymore and he just snaps, dragging a sponge across every surface. Lorraine smokes and dozes off on the porch recliner for those hot summer days, box fan blowing on her face, because if she lit up inside, the sheer density of the fumes would blow them all up so high it’d compete with the meth lab down the street the month before. 

To his credit, Jonas tries to help, but there’s a bitter, proud refusal in Mitch’s snarl that forces him instead to sit on the couch and talk over the clank of aluminum beer cans thrown into a black garbage bag, or over the dull roar of a borrowed (read: stolen) vacuum cleaner that threatens to pull up the thin, stained carpeting. All of these things, the talking, the clanking, the mechanical roar, they all mask the sound of Mitch falling apart. His tank top is soaked through with sweat because _AC? We don’t have any fuckin’ AC in this shithole if your ass is hot go down to the gas station and stand in front of the cooler; be useful and grab a two liter of soda for a moonshine mixer while you’re there, spots_ and his hair is sticking to his forehead as he’s dumping out ashtrays, so many ashtrays. All the while he’s quiet, but Jonas can hear him if he listens, like a crackle of static on a record as every fiber of his psyche is screaming _GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE._

It’s jarringly, hedonistically, disgustingly _real_. 

They fuck for the first time in that trailer, limbs and heavy heartbeats with lungs gasping in that same mix of mildew, tobacco, and chemicals between breaths of sweat and each other’s saliva. The windows are open because there’s no airflow otherwise, and Mitch is very adamant about not fucking in a room with no _fucking_ airflow. Jonas keeps quiet at first, since open windows mean the neighbors can hear (like they couldn’t already, the walls are so thin) but Mitch pushes and pulls him until he’s whining, almost screaming, tears him apart at the seams and stretches him like elastic, and fuck, _fuck, fuck, **Mitch** —_

When Jonas mentions his worries about the neighbors afterward, Mitch laughs so hard the bed shakes. “Like they give a fuck, spots,” he grins as he gets up, then leans halfway out his open window to yell, “AND I DON’T GIVE A _FUCK_ ABOUT THEM!” 

It earns him a few yells from the closer neighbors, two dogs barking, and, after he’s pulled his head back inside, the smirk on his face is wiped clean off by the sound of a gun going off in the distance. 

“Awright, maybe I give a _bit_ of a fuck. Christ.” 

In a house full of kids you expect stains to happen, but somehow, Sue wipes away their existence. Their couches are immaculate, and she has long since learned the futility of carpet, trading it for hardwood and tile flooring. But Mitch’s living room carpeting is like a Picasso painting from all the stains, which are so numerous that nobody’s sure what they all are. There are context clues of course, namely in whatever can is lying next to the stain, but the main culprit is Lorraine’s cigarette habit, which forms a black stain on the floor next to her armchair (from the ash) and a black stain on the ceiling above it (from the smoke). 

It’s a sweltering August afternoon when Jonas comes in to find Mitch hunched over that stain like a bitter rival, eyes watering from the concentration of fumes because he’s scrubbing the floor with bleach, _pure fucking bleach to get out this fucking stain, fuck this stain man, fuck it, **fuck it**_ and it still only manages to fade to a light gray. A walk around the block helps clear Mitch’s eyes and head, even if it doesn’t do much for his heart. 

“You ever see... Ah, fuck it.” Mitch starts, taking a drag off his cigarette. 

“See what?” Jonas prods, and a moment passes before Mitch starts up again, looking down the line of trailers as they walk. 

“You ever see that fuckin’... I don’t know, that ‘trendy’ bullshit? About makin’ things look good to fit some sort of style in your head?” 

Jonas narrows his eyes, like this is a trick. “You mean ‘aesthetic’?” 

“Yeah, that.” Nodding slow, Mitch looks around, gesturing with his cigarette to the trailers around them. “This? This is not my _ass_ -thetic.” 

Chuckling, Jonas shoves his hands in his pockets, kicking a loose chunk of gravel from the street, watching it skip over a worn speed bump. “What is?” 

“Eh?” 

“What is your aesthetic?” Jonas doesn’t expect much of an answer; he figures that Mitch barely knows the word, much less a specific type that he likes. 

“Rockabilly.” No hesitation, not even a second thought. 

“What? Seriously?” 

“Yeah, look.” When Mitch produces his phone with the cracked screen and actually navigates it to a tumblr of rockabilly aesthetic—real aesthetic posts, not just a blog of pinup girls—Jonas is fairly impressed. 

“I didn’t know you were into this stuff.” He admits, a little guilty that he didn’t ask, or even think to ask. 

Mitch pockets his phone, and takes another drag off his cigarette. “’Cause I keep it to my fuckin’ self. Only follower on there I know in real life is Scratch, and that’s only because the little shit got nosy and busted my phone’s passcode.” 

Jonas rolls his eyes. “Well, if your password wasn’t six-nine-six-nine...” There’s a beat, then his eyes widen. “Wait, that’s _your_ blog?” 

Mitch scoffs, and throws his cigarette butt on the ground to smolder. “Who the fuck else’s would it be, your cop prick foster-fuckin’ whatever’s?” 

“Why didn’t you tell me? I have a tumblr, I could follow you and... And stuff.” 

There was a silence between them as they were walking, and Mitch shoved his own hands in his pockets along with his phone, ending the conversation. When they got back to the trailer, the fumes had cleared enough to Mitch to clean up, still silent. It wouldn’t be until much later when, laying side by side on Mitch’s bed, he would finally speak up. 

“Helps me get away.” He mumbled, and Jonas barely heard him. 

“What?” 

“I said it helps me get the _fuck_ away, you happy?” Mitch grumbled, rolling over onto his side. 

Leaning over him, Jonas frowned, nudging his arm. “Away from what?” 

“This.” He gestures to the walls, the graffiti, the trash. “I can’t afford all that shit—the leather coats and white collar shirts and creeper shoes, but. I got the shitty haircut. And I got a place where I can go an’ look at it. So that’s alright.” 

Jonas’s face softened. “Someday you’ll look like that, Mitch.” 

“Don’t go feelin’ sorry for me or some shit, now.” The taller boy grinned, rolling onto his back again. 

There is nothing in the wide world of tumblr or pinterest that can explain the sort of aesthetic their relationship is. Maybe if Jonas searched “Americana” he’d find pieces of it, but only little bits, stowed between shots of things too nostalgia-burdened to be real. Mitch was cigarette butts burnt out between bloodied fingers, he was stained carpeting that tried hard to stay clean, he was the smell of fresh cut grass and sweat sloughing off under hot, _hot_ water in the shower. Jonas was none of these things. Before, he would have never considered himself attracted to these things, would have never thought the smell of mildew and the sight of brown rivulets of tar-leaking walls would be a more pleasing sight than Hobby Lobby’s “God Bless Our Home” and mountain spring febreze. 

It’s an unseasonably warm day in October when Jonas comes over to find Mitch scrubbing those same walls, all the pictures taken down to lean against the kitchen cabinets. He drops his bag on the couch and is ready to take his usual seat, when a grunt from Mitch and a jut of his chin alerts Jonas to an extra sponge—and a pair of worn yellow kitchen gloves, obviously meant for him. Mitch doesn’t use them, he just lets the chemicals soak into his hands like the tough motherfucker he is. 

“You wanna help, Spots?” Mitch questions, returning to his task of scrubbing the wall down. The water in the bucket is sudsy, but already browned from the effort. 

It isn’t even a question, not really. Jonas pulls on the gloves and gets to work right next to him, scrubbing the rivulets he can reach. The harsh chemical smell hurts his nose at first, but he gets used to it. 

“I ordered myself a leather jacket off some weird app Javier showed me, s'called ‘wish’ or somethin’.” 

“That’s great!” Jonas grins, watching the sweat drop down Mitch’s forehead to his nose, watching his eyebrows knit together as he scrubs. 

“Yeah, well, I ain’t a rockabilly yet, but. Maybe something else.” 

“Real Americana?” Jonas questions, and Mitch gives him a heaping dose of side eye, making him nervous until his mouth splits into a grin, flashing his yellowed teeth. 

“Yeah. ...I like it.”

**Author's Note:**

> So a lot of the inspiration for this fic came from my childhood experiences. I grew up with a lot of people similar to Mitch--kids good at the core, but still rowdy assholes--and the trailer I described in this fic is very real to me in my mind. There are many trailers like Lorraine's that I have seen in my life, and a litany of trailer trash kids trying to get them a semblance of clean. I think a lot of people in this fandom want to romanticize the life Mitch is living, and I wanted to try and bring a dose of reality to the mix. So trust me, guys, as someone who has hung out in trailers like his Aunt's, believe me when I promise that it is in no way even remotely glamorous.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
